Condominium: An Architectural History
As pre-construction sales and project launches slow to a trickle, is the end of Canada’s condo era in sight? And what comes next?
Photo by Jack Landau. A view of Toronto’s condo-dominated downtown skyline, fronted by a building clad in the window-wall that characterized high-rise design in the early 21st-century.
For the first three years of my career, I mostly wrote about condominiums. From 2015 to 2017, I worked as an assistant editor at Urban Toronto, a website covering local development across the city and its immediate suburbs. It was a blur of rezoning proposals, official plan amendments, community meetings, site plan applications, demolition permits, groundbreaking ceremonies and construction updates. Every week, new high-rise applications hit the municipal database as Toronto lapped North American counterparts in construction cranes, reflecting the scale of a development and population boom only paralleled in China and the Middle East. Almost all of them were condominiums.
About a year into my tenure, we welcomed co-op students from a local high school. While they quickly absorbed the urbanist lexicon, the term “condo” became a metonym for any of the myriad proposals or construction sites shaping the city. Whether it was an office tower, a purpose-built rental, or even an infrastructure project, they’d call it a “condo.” I didn’t blame them. After all, I noticed variations of the trend among my friends and parents, even industry colleagues. In the Urban Toronto office, it became a running joke. Whenever one of us wanted a stapler, pen, highlighter or a pad of paper, we’d ask a colleague to “pass me that condo.”
Not anymore. For the first time since the turn of the millennium, the condominium market has effectively ground to a dead stop, exhausting a stream of development that held surprisingly steady through the ebbs and flows of recessions (2008), market corrections (2018) and even a global pandemic. For many of us, the effects aren’t yet palpable; construction cranes still dot the skyline, reflecting the afterglow of a generational boom. In 2025, however, the CMHC recorded the lowest condo construction starts since records began in 1998, all as pre-construction buyers scrambled to offload their contracts — often at a substantial loss — while developers pivoted their projects to purpose-built rentals or cancelled them altogether.
What happens next? With the future of Canadian housing at a precipice, forecasting its evolution is predicated on understanding the historical and economic context that made condominiums so popular in the first place. How have condominiums shaped Canadian urban life? What were their origins? How and why did we build so many? For that matter, what exactly is a condominium anyway?
Hammurabi’s Condo
At its core, a condominium is a legal entity that facilitates shared real estate ownership. In an apartment building, for example, it allows each unit to be independently owned, purchased and sold. Though not inherently limited by use — offices, hotels and even industrial properties can also be structured as condominiums — the majority are residential, reflecting an ideal of homeownership that defined North American societies. It’s a form of ownership that has deep historical roots: Archival deeds from Babylonia show that ground floors of city buildings were owned separately from the rest of the structure almost 2,000 years ago.
Yet, the archaeological evidence is a relative outlier. Throughout most of human history, property ownership was tied to the land. While ancient Roman apartment buildings — or insulaei — are sometimes cited as another example of proto-condominia, most historical evidence points that the tenure was more akin to rental apartments, serving as investment properties for their wealthy owners. The term “condominium” itself originated in 13th-century France, where inheritance laws stipulated that castles and properties would be divided equally, a departure from the more common medieval model of primogeniture, where the firstborn child inherits a family’s entire estate. (In Latin, “con” means “together with,” while “dominium” translates to “right of ownership.”)
Collectively owned medieval castles were far from condominiums as we understand them today. Instead, it introduced a model of shared ownership that roughly presaged the housing co-operatives that would emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries. In stark contrast to their aristocratic antecedents, however, organizations like the Rochdale Society of Equitable Volunteers — which established a collective, worker-owned storefront in 1840s England — established a precedent for co-operative ownership. By the turn of the 20th century, housing co-ops spread throughout the United States. In rapidly urbanizing cities like New York and Chicago, early efforts were organized through trade unions, women’s associations, faith groups and ethno-cultural community organizations, with housing co-operatives offering economically vulnerable labourers and low-income immigrants a pathway to secure housing.
While many of the early housing co-operatives were organized under a non-profit, limited equity model, American multi-unit housing eventually turned toward market-rate ownership. Today, much of New York City’s apartment stock comprises market co-operatives. Under this model, owners don’t actually purchase homes; they buy shares of a corporation that owns the property, with the number of shares equivalent to the size and value of each unit. It makes for a baroque and often opaque process, requiring board approvals and prospective shareholder interviews, and allowing applicants to be rejected without justification. Whether purpose-built as co-ops or — more commonly — converted from former rental buildings, these properties largely predate the invention of the condominium.
The modern condominium itself is a surprisingly little studied phenomenon, though its European origins trace to a Belgian statute in 1924, with similar legislation evolving in Greece, Italy, Spain and France throughout the 1920s and 30s. In the United States, condominium law originated in Puerto Rico in 1958, borrowing from Cuban and Spanish precedents. Facing an acute housing shortage, the island territory’s legislation was updated to allow separately owned, multi-unit housing. Hawaii and Utah followed shortly thereafter. In Salt Lake City, the low-rise Graystone Pines complex became the first residential condominium in the continental United States in 1960.
Geared toward residents aged 50 and over, the 120-unit complex comprises a cluster of two-storey buildings surrounded by shared green space and surface parking. Though initially planned as a market-rate co-op, a new tenure type was championed by local lawyer Keith Romney (a scion of the same Utah political family as his cousin Mitt). Under Romney’s newly codified condominium plan, residents owned their homes outright, with shared ownership — and professional management — over common elements. Moreover, owners would be free to rent or sell their properties to the highest bidder, making for a much more streamlined and transparent process. Advertising consisted of a simple tagline: “No More Yardwork.”
Condos Come to Canada
Canada’s first condominium laws were adopted slightly later. Amid the centennial celebrations of 1967, the country was quietly adopting a housing paradigm that would come to define urban life in the 21st century. In both Alberta and British Columbia, new condominium legislation was enacted in 1966. Completed a year later by developer MHA Properties, Edmonton’s Brentwood Village became the country’s first legally registered condominium corporation. Like Salt Lake City’s, the 56-unit project was relatively modestly scaled, with clusters of townhouse rows framed by front lawns and backyards.
A year later, British Columbia’s first registered condominium complex — another two-storey row of townhomes — was registered in the Vancouver suburb of Port Moody, and designed by Arthur Erickson. Yet, as Christopher Cheung reported in The Tyee, it wasn’t the first condominium in the country, or even the first to feature an Erickson design. In 1965, relatively little-known citizen developer Lois Milsom unveiled a cluster of five bayfront townhouses on Kitsilano’s exclusive Point Grey Road. Conscious of her relatively compact site’s constraints, Milsom hired Erickson to design an ingeniously contoured series of homes; the spacious properties shared walls and driveways.
Municipal planners were wary of individually owned homes with common elements — a precedent that did not yet technically exist under Canadian law. Yet, Milsom persisted, completing a de facto condominium complex following a planning process that dragged on for nearly three years. As the Point Grey Homes welcomed their residents, Erickson completed the first phase of Simon Fraser University’s landmark campus, becoming one of North America’s most celebrated architects over the next two decades.
In Ontario, meanwhile, the provincial Condominium Act was introduced in 1967. During an era of rapid growth and high-rise rental development, Toronto’s first condo complex was an understated cluster of suburban townhouses near Albion Mall. The developer was Bert Winberg, whose company Rockport Group would become a fixture of the local condo industry.
“In those days it was a tough sell,” Winberg told The Globe & Mail in 2004. “But people began to realize that a condo meant they could buy a home for a reasonable carrying cost.”
By the time Winberg completed the 59-unit project — itself first planned as a rental development — condominiums were already popular in Florida and California. North of the border, however, “no one knew what a condo was,” said Winberg. Yet, the upside was relatively obvious; condominiums offered a pathway to home ownership at a lower cost than a traditional single-family dwelling, particularly during an era marked by high interest rates and a glut of young baby boomers entering the housing market. In markets like Florida, the combination of warm weather and professional maintenance made condominium living an affordable haven for retirees, while resort towns like Whistler popularized condominiums as weekend getaways.
There were benefits for developers too. Following a project’s delivery, condominium sales allowed businesses to recoup their investment relatively quickly — a contrast to the decades-long cash flow and appreciation that shapes rental development. In turn, this allowed developers to undertake more new projects and repeat the process. By 1971, Rockport Group was producing 400 townhouse condominium units per year.
The coming year brought another quiet watershed moment to Toronto’s condominium market. In 1972, Pinetree Development Co. introduced Canada’s first commercial condo at 155 University Avenue. Designed by WZMH Architects, the brutalist high-rise introduced condominiums as offices. That same year brought another novelty — one that would prove far more momentous to the future of Canadian life. In 1972, federal tax reform halved the accelerated depreciation rates for rental housing. This effectively disincentivized the construction of rental apartments, decreasing the rate of return available to developers in the first years after a project’s completion. Meanwhile, a new capital gains tax was introduced — with a notable exemption for primary residences.
Glass, Steel and Ownership Culture
The tax reforms of 1972 were followed by an even deeper reduction to accelerated depreciation, as well as new incentives for homebuyers. Over the coming decades, it transformed the type of housing being built. In 1972, close to 50% of all Canadian housing starts were rental units, even as privately owned single-family homes sprawled across the suburban peripheries. Between 2001 and 2010, less than 10% of the decade’s national housing starts were rental properties. Meanwhile, rapid inflation brought crucial rent control policies, which protected tenants but limited long term revenue for property owners. By the end of the 1970s, the slab form rental towers fuelled by the credits of the pre-1972 tax code soon stopped being built.
As the production of rental housing slowed, condos got bigger, evolving from early townhouse projects to include mid- and high-rise buildings. New styles ranged from sober concrete and brick late modernism to the stuccoed flourishes of PoMo design. Yet, Canada never again approached the high per-capita housing production rates of the 1970s. As immigration continued to fuel steady population growth, chronic scarcity of housing made homeownership a driver of wealth creation, fuelled by low interest rates and the rapid expansion of cheap credit.
In 1989, it all came crashing down, as rising inflation put an abrupt end to an overheated housing market. By the middle of the 1990s, both private- and public-sector housing construction fell to record lows. While low demand and high interest rates stymied multi-unit condo starts, the federal government cut funding for affordable non-market co-ops and social housing construction. The climb out of the 1989 housing crash was slow: It would take some 13 years for national home values to recover.
For some condo-dwellers, things got even worse. On the west coast, the “leaky condo crisis” of the 1990s saw some 900 buildings and 31,000 dwellings damaged by rainwater infiltration. Mostly afflicting low- and mid-rise buildings constructed in the 1980s, the fallout brought over $4 billion in property damage to British Columbia. Much of the failure was architectural. Building studies later diagnosed common design problems: Roof parapets lacking overhangs or eaves, stucco wall cladding, open walkways, arched windows, and complex cladding joints all provided opportunities for water penetration. For architects across Canada, the economic fallout resulted in widespread changes to professional insurance, shaping the creation of Ontario’s Pro-Demnity in 2003.
Throughout the 1990s, new urban planning paradigms began to shape Canadian cities. Toronto’s ambitious “Two Kings” plan of 1996 saw a pair of industrial zones flanking downtown rezoned into mixed-use districts. Former warehouses and factories were transformed into offices and residential lofts, setting the stage for 21st century condo towers. In Vancouver, meanwhile, local architect James K.M. Cheng pioneered a new housing typology. Completed in 1993, the 33-storey development at 888 Beach combines a lithe and slender glass tower with a low-rise brick base of townhouses framing the tower.
“The Vancouver tower-podium typology is effectively invented with this hybrid of tall thin towers with continuous street and raised garden-flanking townhouses,” writes Trevor Boddy in a Canadian Architect retrospective of Cheng’s work. Completed in 1998, Cheng’s Residences on Georgia — designed for influential west coast developer Westbank — set a “paradigmatic standard for the tower and podium.” Two glass towers are embraced by leafy rows of townhouses, combining with a Jane Jacobs of “eyes on the street,” Boddy notes. It set out a model of intimate urbanity, though one that would be replicated with diminishing returns nationwide. (Cheng himself later became a prominent critic of the model, which was better attuned to quiet, leafy downtown Vancouver streets than Toronto’s urban fabric).
Cheng’s design influenced the school of urban thought that would come to be known as “Vancouverism.” Slender residential towers were paired with wide commercial bases, creating a new template for mixed-use intensification of transit-oriented downtown sites. The idea’s most prominent exponent was urban planner Larry Beasley, who, as Boddy notes, himself became a resident at 888 Beach. In Toronto, the podium and point tower model of development was similarly influential — and encoded into urban design guidelines. Entire new neighborhoods like Concord CityPlace, Humber Bay Shores and South Core followed the same formal model, completed with similar window wall facade systems.
Little of it is architecturally distinguished. Over the past 20 years, Peter Clewes (architects—Alliance) and David Pontarini (Hariri Pontarini Architects) emerged as Toronto’s leading condo designers. On Adelaide Street, Clewes’ 45-storey SP!RE condo (2006) exemplifies the best of its time, pairing a crisp, assertive glass tower with a low-rise podium that meets a quieter urban context north of Adelaide. Completed a decade later, Pontarini’s One Bloor was another landmark building to emerge from the era. The 76-storey tower is distinguished by its sleek curtain wall cladding, as well as a sinuous balcony pattern that evokes the movement of waves across both the tower and its block-long base.
By the turn of the millennium, a new urban paradigm was taking hold. The socio-economic and environmental effects of suburban sprawl were increasingly apparent, resulting in land use regulations to limit single-family greenfield development. And like their boomer parents decades earlier, Gen X and elder millennials were setting out on their own, with a renewed interest in living downtown. From Vancouver and Toronto, high-rise condominium construction also began to shape Calgary, Edmonton and (to a lesser extent) Montreal, transforming Canada’s largest cities.
Emerging from the depths of the 1990s real estate crash, changes to lending practices also transformed how condominiums are bought and sold. While much of the speculative burden prior to 1989 was placed on financial institutions, lenders began to demand that developers pre-sell at least 70% of condominium units before underwriting a loan. In this logic, pre-construction sales were a way of reducing risk, giving lenders assurance that housing demand existed. It didn’t work out that way. Over the last two decades, demand increasingly shifted from residents to small investors, who did not intend to live in the units they purchased.
Condo investors proved at least as speculative as the banks. Among the public, it fuelled an exuberant belief that condos would deliver higher returns than the stock market. In turn, pre-construction prices occasionally exceeded that of existing units, predicated on the belief that rising prices would allow new condos to be flipped for quick profit shortly after completion. Still, condos kept getting built and residents kept moving in. On the eve of the pandemic, some 57% of recently completed Toronto condos were owned by investors.
Even before COVID-19 spread across the world, Canadian interest rates hovered near historic lows. By March of 2020, however, rates were slashed to rock bottom amidst widespread economic panic. Instead of a deep and lasting recession, the coming years brought a glut of economic activity, with record job creation mirrored by a “great resignation.” In the Canadian housing market, prices soared. For Toronto, 2021 was a record year for condo sales.
By 2021, approximately 15% of all Canadians lived in condominiums. In Toronto and Calgary, approximately 24% of the population were condo-dwellers. The title of Canada’s — perhaps the world’s — condominium capital belongs to Vancouver, where roughly a third of all residents live in condominiums. It is a marked contrast to the United States, where only 6% of the population calls a condominium home.
After the Crash
Compared to cities like New York, Chicago and Boston, the Canadian metropolis is a relatively new invention. Among Canadian urban hubs, only Montreal and Quebec retain a core fabric that predates the automobile. Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary all became major cities much more recently, with most population growth happening after 1950. In this respect, the glass and steel character of large Canadian downtowns is more closely echoed in 21st-century Sun Belt boomtowns like Charlotte, Austin and Phoenix.
That the condo became a quintessentially Canadian housing is in part a product of this history. To wit, most of New York’s housing stock predates the invention of the condominium. Yet, even in fast-growing American cities, condominiums are rarely as dominant a housing type.
The differences are rooted in policy. American federal mortgage rules limit the proportion of units that can be purchased by investors, while consumer-protection measures put a greater onus on developers to compensate for structural defects up to a decade after a building’s completion.
A comparison of Vancouver and Seattle is particularly instructive. While Cascadia’s two largest cities share climactic, geographic and cultural similarities, new housing is delivered very differently. In 2016, nearly 60% of Vancouver housing starts were condominiums. Conversely, the Seattle condo market accounted for under 10% of planned buildings from 2017 to 2020. Instead, purpose-built rentals dominate multi-unit construction. Writing in Sightline, Margaret Morales cites Canada’s unfavorable rental tax code as a key factor in condo development, while arguing that higher standards of professional liability led to higher insurance costs for condo developers in Washington State. While Morales’s description of the American housing landscape may be soothing reading for beleaguered Canadian condo buyers, she argues that “condominium development could be a good thing for prospective homebuyers in Seattle as condos are cheaper than single-family houses, which currently dominate the options for home ownership.”
In Canada, it all added up to a strange bargain. For decades, federal policies continuously spurred investor demand. High rates of immigration were paired with demand-side public policies for homebuying that expanded credit, carved out tax incentives and extended amortizations, while curtailing rental development and keeping properties exempt from capital gains. For developers, it all created a reliable stream of pre-construction buyers; a cohort increasingly comprising small-scale investors who did not intend to live in the units themselves, instead creating a secondary rental market.
Conversely, governments increasingly leaned on the development industry via escalating taxes and local development charges, as municipalities constrained supply through restrictive zoning and lengthy, capital-intensive approvals. For a new home in Ontario, taxes accounted for 36% of the purchase price in 2025. From 2010 to 2025, meanwhile Toronto’s municipal development charges rose 993%. As governments raised taxes on development with one hand, they fed the industry with the other — juicing demand and consistently encouraging new pre-construction buyers.
Everything is changing again. Amid flatlining pre-construction sales, the cultural expectation of a consistently hot housing market is unlikely to return anytime soon. Even in a turbulent economy, it isn’t difficult to find channels for private investment more reliable and profitable than housing. In the meantime, purpose-built rental housing is experiencing a gradual resurgence. The federal government has introduced a GST/HST rebate for new rental housing, along with new loan programs and guarantees for rental projects, particularly those offering affordable rents. Combined with persistently high rents, it makes new construction increasingly attractive to long-term institutional investors like pension plans and real estate investment trusts (REITs).
Buildings will look different too. Given the economic viability of rental housing is predicated on long term returns, developers have an incentive to reduce chronic maintenance costs and maximize rents decades down the line. In terms of build quality, this translates to improved finishes and higher quality cladding, allowing for easier maintenance and replacement — not to mention greater efficiency — compared to glass window-wall assemblies. Even the sporadic rental projects completed over the last decade tend to be subtly differentiated from condos, introducing more solid facades as well as slightly more generous unit layouts, which cater to prospective residents rather than pre-construction investors.
A rising emphasis on missing-middle densities is also slowly shaping Canadian cities. Compact sixplex apartments and accessory dwellings are being legalized across the country, while pending code changes for single stair egress and fire safety standards are poised to allow more new development on single-family lots. From coast to coast, missing-middle projects are being divided and sold as condominiums of just two, three or four units, echoing Lois Milsom’s early efforts to establish shared ownership. A reconsideration of restrictive zoning and urban design is also facilitating new mid-rise development, aided by fast-evolving mass timber and wood construction standards. Meanwhile, the federal government’s gradual return to the housing business means that non-equity co-ops are once again becoming part of the urban landscape — with bold architecture to boot.
Even the condos of the future won’t look the same. New urban design approaches — and high land values — increasingly challenge the podium and point tower model, which seldom achieved its aspirations. In Toronto, updated sustainability standards are limiting thermally inefficient all-glass facades in new buildings, all as critics warn of another pending “leaky condo crisis” for aging window-wall towers. Condominiums or not, the towers of the future will look more solid and opaque. Over the coming decades, the glass high-rises we colloquially think of as “condo towers” are gradually poised to fade into the rearview mirror. It may be strange to imagine now, but we may one day perceive these buildings as part of our heritage, as relics of our clumsy attempts to build dense, sustainable and welcoming urban communities. And like most any historic architecture, we’ll eventually start to like them.
Thank you to Sebastián López Cardozo for invaluable assistance with research and critical thinking that shaped this essay.
